One of the biggest pet peeves I have is when a book opens with a death.

As always with any writing advice, take things with a grain of salt. If you want to do something badly enough, you can certainly find a way to make it work. However, this is my rodeo, so I am going to tell you some general reasons why I don’t feel it’s a good idea. May they help you either foment a way to make an early death work or help you see why maybe it’s best to lead with something else.

So, why does opening with death generally fail to be effective?

Short answer: because we haven’t known the characters long enough for it to have much impact.

Long answer: let’s dig down and define “effective”. What do we want this death to accomplish?

Death can be a lot of things in fiction. A catalyzing event– something to spur your protagonist on, to make them resolved. Perhaps a moment of isolation and questioning, especially when a parent or mentor figure dies. Death can help us set the stakes– if someone we’ve interacted with dies due to an event or the antagonist, we’re going to take that threat much more seriously. Death is transformative, not just for the person who experiences it, but the people around them.

Death can also be used to set the tone of the story. For example, we’ve all read prologues (do not get me started) where the temporary narrator dies at the end, usually at the hands of the antagonist (sometimes the protagonist). This can help us understand that we’re living in a very dangerous world (sff genres) or that this death is going to be the focus of the entire story (murder mysteries, suspense/thrillers, etc).

What I’m trying to get at here is that death is a pretty massive lever.

My question is: are you sure you want to use this right at the beginning?

Maybe you are writing a story which needs a death at the beginning. Maybe the murder victim has to die so that your detective protagonist can figure out who killed them. Maybe we need to show the reader right off the bat that the characters in this story live in a dangerous world and are prepared to do anything to achieve their goals. All these are situations where an early death may help your story take off.

However, there are also scenarios where an early death may hobble your story. Here are some of the most common pitfalls I’ve seen, both from my time reading queries and my own experiences as a reader.

Someone close to the protagonist dies in Chapter 1 (or another early chapter). This is a scenario when the protagonist is going to be feeling a lot of big emotions (grief is no joke!) that the reader simply will not be able to emphasize with yet. We just don’t know the main character well enough to be invested in their sadness! Grief, especially the early stages of losing someone, can be all-consuming. It can be hard to get a sense of who someone is when they’re in the deep stages of mourning like that.

This is exactly why opening on a funeral tends to fall flat: we have been invited to an event where we have no idea who the dead person was. We have no connection to them, and the person who is supposed to be our new friend (the narrator/protagonist) is flipping out or sad or in some other way unrelatable. It’s hard to form a connection and develop investment when all we can see of someone is their sadness.

In the best case, we’re going to end up bored and unable to understand their grief. In the worst case, we’re going to be frustrated that all they want to do is be sad and put down the book.

Instead, I’d ask 1) whether or not you really need this death to occur before the story and 2) if you do, then how possible would it be to start the story a few months after the death. Often, a death will be much more effective when we know both the person dying and are close to the person effected (notice how most deaths which make us cry in fiction occur around the 2/3 to 3/4 point in a book– plenty of time for us to bond to the characters).

Often this extra space of time will be enough for a character to still reap the benefits of being transformed by the death (hardened by it, softened by it, etc), while allowing them enough time to stabilize.

Remember, when we first start reading a book, it’s also a process of us getting to know and in a sense becoming friends with the protagonist. It’s really hard to make friends with someone who’s sad all the time– there’s not a lot of space for us to see what makes them such a compelling person outside their sadness. Giving your protagonist space after a traumatic event like a death allows them to come back to themselves and help us connect with them better.

The narrator is temporary (and dies to advance the plot). This is a pet peeve of mine mostly because I read a lot of fantasy. We follow a hapless narrator, often a guard, a peasant, or someone who is tangential to the main action, moving through a day, and then at the end of the prologue/first chapter, they are cut down to show either the brutality of the world, antagonist, etc.

We invested all that time getting to know this person of humble origins and then they just die on us. That is so frustrating! It makes me, as the reader, trust you a little less as the storyteller– you’ve just gotten me to like someone and then you’ve thrown that person under the bus. Cool! Now you’re going to ask me to empathize with and invest in another character in the next chapter? Good luck! I’m going to feel much more wary trusting you, and it’ll likely take me a lot longer to trust that your next narrator character is going to be worthy of my time investment.

While we reap the benefit of getting perhaps more insight into the world, how the antagonist kills people, or get a front row seat to an arguably very cool scene, is it worth the cost? Consider that in the next chapter you’ll just have to reset the entire scene with someone new narrating. Again, this isn’t impossible, but it’s an extra consideration you have to make.

Can you view this in a similar vein as shifting POV characters? Sure, totally! You’ll still have that slight breach in reader trust to contend with, but your techniques can be the same. It may also be helpful to make the character in the prologue who died significant in some other way (perhaps the protagonist finds their child or a relative and is able to provide closure).

Too much extra information. This is the last main pet peeve I have with early death. Beyond the extra emotion and the emotional investment catfish, sometimes seeing an event through the eyes of the dying person gives us too much information about who the villain is or how the plot turns, especially if this is information that the other characters in the story don’t yet know.

For example, it’s a less effective move to open your murder mystery with a prologue where the killer does their bloody business and it’s clear who their identity is. Now the reader knows who the murderer is and everyone else in the story doesn’t– that’s very frustrating for the reader! Also, what’s left to motivate them to keep reading? They already know who the killer is!

It’s good to be careful what information you choose to reveal in prologues like this. It’s much more gratifying, especially in books where the puzzle is central to the reader’s satisfaction, to have the reader and the protagonist figure out things at about the same time (sometimes even having the protag be a step ahead or two of the reader for zest). Especially if you plan on having your protagonist undercover this same information later, it will be much less of a surprise for the reader than it is your main character, as the reader has known it all along.

I think that if you can address those three things when you’re dealing with an early death, then you’ll be in a better spot to manage the narrative around it. Again, the most helpful advice I can think of here is to view the opening pages of your book as a first impression of your protagonist: is that impression accurate to who they’ll be for the rest of the book, and does it make the reader want to stick with them for a few hundred pages?

What do you think? Any deaths at the start of books that you feel like are done well?

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